How to Use SEO for Branding Purposes
SEO is the basis for building your brand. Whether you’re purely online or you use the internet to increase walk-ins to your brick-and-mortar store, improving your site’s visibility in the search engines is a practice you should master.
There are other search engines but Google is the most popular among users. It is important to note that Google ranking algorithm changes from time to time. What was used to rank you high today might not be so useful tomorrow.
Generally, features such as excellent user experience, speed of your site, mobile-friendliness, and quality links to your site all contribute to Google’s site ranking. If you’re building your brand, SEO will be very useful whether you’re launching a new site or simply branding an existing one.
Why is Brand Recognition Critical?
Sales and marketing are both important but brand awareness is usually underrated. When marketing your products, the ability of consumers to recognize your brand makes it easy to make sales. 82% of consumers who search online prefer brands they recognize.
The concept of brand awareness and how it’s related to your online presence and lead generation may seem vague and blur. It’s also challenging to build especially for small businesses competing with already-established brands but it’s doable. That is why you need to know what is brand awareness and why it’s critical for your business.
What is Brand Awareness?
Brand awareness is the ability of the consumers to recognize and recall your company and products whenever they are in need
It is different for every company. For companies that sell everyday products, it means the consumers have the brand at the top of their minds. For the others, it’s enough to know when the customer needs a product, they recognize your company and the products.
Why Brand Awareness Matters
It helps keep you as the go-to brand for your audience. If they recognize your products and the brand, they’re more likely to buy from you instead of your competitor who doesn’t have the same advantage, when the need arises.
Brand awareness is also important when you want to meet certain goals like expanding your audience, improving traffic to your site, cultivating leads, building brand affinity, and consequently, conversions.
It’s not surprising that brand awareness holds the top place in the marketing funnel. People are more attracted and feel a sense of trust towards brands they can recognize and identify with. With brand awareness, you’ll attract an interested audience as well as nurture the existing one.
Branding with SEO
As mentioned, SEO takes a center stage in branding. Both local and organic SEO contributes to your brand’s awareness.
For businesses targeting the local audience, optimizing your local SEO will help you rank high on local results. If you do this consistently, together with other SEO branding tactics, you’ll see positive results.
Optimizing your organic SEO will also result in more visibility in organic results.
Difference Between Organic and Local Results
The main difference is that local results have a geographical component. When a consumer searches for a product + location, Google displays results in that location.
Organic results have no local intent. The person is usually looking for information without the geographical component. If you optimize your organic SEO and consumers know you’re the go-to expert for information in your niche, your SEO branding will be on the road to success.
Role of SEO in a Brand’s Inbound Strategy
More than 198 million people are blocking ads mainly because they are interruptive. Marketers have to think of ways to reach the audience without being interruptive but in a way that will attract the consumer.
Inbound marketing does just that. It attracts potential customers to your site rather than advertising your products and/or services outwards. The most common channels are using SEO, social media like Facebook, and platforms such as Quora or Reddit.
If you plan to use SEO as a channel for your Inbound strategy, all your content in content marketing, social media, email marketing should be optimized. Quality content is priceless.
SEO will;
- Improve your content’s ranking in search engines
- Links from reputable sites builds your credibility and reputation
- Proper keywords and content optimization increases your visibility
- More followers and page views increase engagement and lead
SEO will drive traffic, grow leads, and conversions to your site.
Storytelling and SEO
It might seem absurd to tell stories to brand your business but when integrated with SEO, it will get you found when you’re needed.
Of course, your storytelling should engage consumers in a way that motivates them. It should also be relevant to their needs.
A typical story may tell of how a certain consumer used your products/services and how they helped them. Present your product as a solution to your customers’ problems.
When you incorporate SEO in your storytelling, you’ll see increased click-through rates, more user engagement, increased traffic, and potentially more backlinks.
Practices of SEO and Branding Together
Content is king. To build your brand, your content must be quality. More traffic, leads, and conversions will be the results. Use these SEO branding practices.
- Using the right keywords will improve visibility.
- Link building from reputable sites are priceless
- Optimize your headings, subheadings, and tags for higher rankings.
- Implement local SEO
- Monitor brand mentions
What to Avoid When Doing SEO for Branding
As much as you want to build your brand using SEO, avoid these rookie mistakes.
- Do not duplicate content also known as plagiarism. Google punishes sites with duplicate content.
- Inauthentic link building schemes such as pay-for-links are penalized. Spammy links on your sites are devalued leading to a low ranking.
- Keywords improve your ranking in SERPs but keyword stuffing harms the ranking.
- Slow loading pages will prompt Google to rank you lower and you’ll also suffer high bounce rates.
Conclusion
Brand recognition is the first step to driving traffic to your site, generating leads and conversions. SEO is crucial in branding. It helps your brand to stand out and be visible in the search engines. Incorporating SEO in storytelling is a good practice to keep your audience motivated. Ensure to avoid common SEO mistakes for the best results.
